[LINK] "Google Begins Fixing Usenet Archive"

[rfmcdonald]

I don't normally do a [LINK] post on Saturday morning, but the subject of this Wired article struck me as especially important.

Google has pulled its Google Groups development team out of the basement broom closet and begun patching up its long-broken Usenet library, in response to our story Wednesday highlighting the company’s neglect of the 700 million post archive.

“It turns out there was a bug, a specific bug, that affected search within a specific group,” Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou told wired.com late Wednesday. “That bug is something we’re working on fixing, and I think that will be fixed by tomorrow. Thanks for writing this, because that’s how we discovered this specific bug.”

Epicenter decided to wait to see results before reporting on Google’s change of heart. Come Thursday morning, we find that Google has, indeed, corrected one of the most serious usability problems with its Usenet search. Searching within a specific newsgroup now works fine. Within alt.hypertext, for example, Google now finds “844 results for mosaic” instead of zero.

Google was widely hailed as heroic in late 2001 when it rescued two decades of orphaned Usenet posts and put them in Google Groups. But in the years since, meaningful access to the archive became all but impossible as search and indexing bugs proliferated on the site, a situation that was only passingly acknowledged by Google until Wednesday night.

Searching or browsing a range of dates is still broken, but the company says it has begun working in earnest on making Google Groups usable again. “We’re aware of the larger issues with Groups search, and we’ll continue to work on improving the product,” said spokesman Jason Freidenfelds, in a follow-up e-mail.